Losing Money to Be a Tycoon

The download speed of the official platform was very stable, and the download progress bar was steadily growing, but it still took some time.

Qiao Liang took a can of Fat House Happy Water from the fridge and sat in front of the computer thinking of playing something random to pass the time, but still couldn't help but check where the update progress bar was every little while.

"This feels like I'm dreaming back ten years ago ah ......"

Qiao Liang still remembers when he was in elementary school, his family invested heavily in a computer with a small screen, a big head, a dial-up connection, and a small water pipe speed of less than 100K, which was slow enough to load pictures from a web page, and limited to a limited amount of bandwidth and time.

At that time, Qiao Liang had to be very meticulous in his calculations, so he used a small notebook to write down the strategies he found on the Internet, and then played the levels that he couldn't get through in the stand-alone games.

When broadband became available, the speed improved a bit and Qiao Liang started downloading games from the Internet. At that time, with a speed of several hundred kilobytes, sometimes it would take several hours or even more to download a dozen gigabytes of games.

At that time, Qiao Liang's mood was exactly the same as it is now, and he always needed to check the progress of the download every now and then.

The moment the game was downloaded, he was very excited to install it, and then entered the game and saw the beautiful game CG...... was really the most wonderful moment.

At that time, Qiao Liang had to fight with his parents when he wanted to play on the computer, and he was always afraid that he would be scolded if he was caught accidentally.

But then he became independent, and became a game owner himself, so he played too many games.

Often, he bought a game, put it away and forgot to play it, or just played the beginning of it and never picked it up again.

It had been a long, long time since he'd experienced a feeling like the one he'd felt before when he downloaded a game and cheered the moment it was finished.

But this time, for some reason, he suddenly had that feeling again!

This time of day is a lot like the nervous, anticipatory feeling he gets when he sneaks up in the middle of the night to go to his study and play on his computer without his parents finding out.

In a mood that Jo-Liang couldn't wait for, Mission and Choices was finally updated!

However, Jo Leung noted that although the update is complete, it continues to download in the background.

This was because the current tens of gigabytes of content were the base content of the game, including the game itself and the two or three plot images at the beginning.

In order to ensure the best viewing experience, the quality of all the images is basically Ultra HD Blu-ray quality as well, though not to the same degree as cinema.

However, this also means that the movies take up a lot of space, even as much as the game itself.

The production team deliberately separated the two downloads so that players wouldn't have to download too much content in one go. The content of the latter image is put to download in the background, so players can start the game early.

During the course of the game, the backstory images were also downloaded.

The Mission and Choice icon didn't change at all after the update was completed, nor did the game detail page, which still had the original very dated, pixelated promotional images and the very OMG promotional phrases.

Qiao Liang even suspected that if some players had auto-update on, they wouldn't even notice that Mission & Choice had been updated with such a big package if they didn't look closely.

But it made Qiao Liang even more excited for the game!

Qiao Liang calmed his excitement and entered the game.

The original very rubbish Mission and Choice didn't have any opening CG, and after entering the game it was directly a very rough title screen, with only a few simple options like start game, load game, settings, etc.

And after starting the game and going into the first chapter, it was just a PPT-worthy picture with a few lines to briefly introduce the background of the story, and then it was straight into the game screen.

Even at that time, this attitude was very perfunctory and outrageous, after all, the same period of the game is also a mosaic style of painting, but at least the film and the film will still have a lot of CG.

Even games like Fantasy Wars were already very high in CG at the time, and looked astonishing in those days, even crushing the new games that came out years later.

But with the updated Mission & Choice, it became something completely different!

After a black screen and a few logos, a pair of closed eyes appeared on the screen.

The eyes were closed, but one could tell that the eyeballs were spinning rapidly, and in the meantime, tiny beads of sweat were oozing from his forehead, as if he was experiencing a terrible nightmare.

Qiao Liang was stunned.

"This CG level is too high, isn't it?"

"It's nothing like a real person!"

Qiao Liang has seen some of the 3A masterpieces that have invested heavily in CG production, and the pores on the characters' faces are clearly visible.

But to this extent of clarity, I've never seen one!

As a result, in the next second, the camera zoomed up and Jo Liang saw the man's entire face.

"...... Isn't this fucking Lu Zhiyao!"

"Which is not doing it for real, this is real! It's not even CG, it's a movie!"

Watching the hibernation pod in the picture open automatically, Lu Zhi Yao rolled over and sat up, Qiao Liang instantly understood, no wonder it's so real, it's not CG at all!

"That means ...... Page always puts movies in games?"

"Wouldn't that mean that if I buy the game, I'm whoring out the movie for nothing?"

"Or is buying the movie the equivalent of whoring out the game for nothing?"

"Uh ...... seems a bit off."

"That's fine, but mixing a movie and a game together, that's going to be a problem in terms of plot pacing, right?"

After all, Qiao Liang has played many games and is instinctively a little worried about this practice of combining games and movies into one.

In fact, there were some companies in foreign countries that used to use live-action photography to make game CG, but that had been around for some years.

Moreover, the vast majority of game companies have not adopted this approach since then, and since it hasn't become mainstream, it's a problematic approach.

For example, the game's plot is cut up, and each chapter of the plot may be divided into a dozen or so sections that aren't closely related to each other, all of which pick the best piece of the plot to use as CG.

As for the middle sections, they can be filled in with game content.

But the movie's plot must be coherent, and it naturally conflicts with the game's approach to plotting.

"Maybe it's intercepting part of the movie's plot?"

"But it's quite wasteful, and it always feels like it might be difficult to handle in terms of details."

"It would be acceptable for a less refined game company in general to do so, but Tengda has always been a stickler for detail, and Pei should not allow such small flaws to exist."

"Or is there a better solution?"

The plot was great, and Qiao Liang didn't have much time to think about all this nonsense, as these thoughts just flashed through his mind and then were temporarily sealed away.

The HD gaming display with the gaming headset was not the most perfect viewing experience, but it definitely wasn't bad either.

Qiao Liang was quickly and completely captivated by the game's plot.

The CG of other games basically served as a spice, and was usually not very long due to financial constraints, mainly to get the player into the state as quickly as possible.

But this segment of Mission and Choice is clearly long, and is not an intercept of a small episode, but rather a serious attempt to tell a complete story.

After Qin Yi accepts his position as commander, AEEIS introduces him to the various functions of the console, including the observation sphere, the touchscreen, the holograms around him, and so on.

And after Qin Yi officially started operating it, your computer screen on Qiao Liang's side seamlessly switched to the game screen as well.

With no game titles, no plot chapters or story synopses, Qiao Liang found himself naturally subbing into Qin Yi's role.

AEEIS's voice continues, but this time it becomes instructing the player on what to do.

Instead of using the words "mouse", "keyboard", "joystick", etc., AEEIS blurts out "turn the view! ", "Select Troops", etc., this is to keep the player out of the play.

Instead, a simple icon prompt appears on the screen, such as a simple mouse shape outlined by a white line + arrow when you need to mouse circle a troop to select it, prompting the player to perform the relevant action.

The overall UI is almost identical to the one in the movie, and the freedom of perspective is very high, and while it's not at all comparable to the kind of holographic images in the movie, the whole picture looks much grander when zoomed in than in other games with that kind of locked God perspective.

The first level's plot is very simple, simply guiding the player to get used to controlling the game's perspective and watching a simulated image of the collapse of the Combined Fleet after their encounter with the Zerg.

After the game's content ends, it again seamlessly switches to the cinematic content.

What was originally a player-operated screen becomes a cinematic image, showing what was just shown in a more ambitious way.

However, the actions during the game are much freer and take much longer than the movie, so it doesn't feel like the plot is repetitive, but rather reinforces the impression of the plot in the player's mind.

This is followed by the second scenario and the actual battle, and the third scenario and the actual battle ......

Jo-Liang found that the game Mission and Choice didn't seem to do things quite the same way as other games.

In other games, it was the game content itself that was the main focus, and the plot CG was interspersed with the game content to serve as an embellishment.

In contrast, in Mission and Choice, it's actually the episodic cinematics that run through and tie up the entire story line, and instead, the game's content is interspersed as embellishment.

The difference between these two approaches is that the former gives a strong sense of paragraphs, and the chapters and levels are actually quite fragmented from each other, and the articulation is not very natural.

Some of the game's new levels even have to be loaded and read from the bar, which is even less friendly to the player.

Mission & Choice, on the other hand, doesn't feel like it's splitting up between chapters and levels at all.

It's like the approach that a lot of making scenarios to AAA masterpieces is using.

The traditional way is to read the bar during scene transitions, but these plot to 3A masterpieces make the experience more coherent by making special handling of transitions, such as a tunnel collapsing, the protagonist crawling through a narrow cave, etc., and reading the content of the scene after that at the same time, the bar-reading screen never appears.

Mission & Choices apparently does this as well, playing the scenario movie between two levels, and the player watches the movie while the next level is already loaded.

The plot is then cleverly arranged so that the movie portion of the game is perfectly connected to the gameplay portion, without creating any awkward or unnatural feeling for the player.

Even though we haven't gotten to the actual combat part yet, just the beginning of this gameplay experience has already made Jo-Liang feel like this new Mission & Choice is definitely completely different from all the RTS games that have come before it!